Category: social body

Universal Education a Pre-Requisite for Effective Eugenics Policies

Source: G.W. Cooke, discussing ‘Social Darwinism’  in American Journal of Sociology 12 (March 1907), 714-715. Below the image is OCR scanned text.  If anyone would like to send a cleaned edition, that would be greatly appreciated. I wish to call attention to the fact that natural selection must work in a different manner among men …

Continue reading

E.A. Ross and the Difference in Races

Source: E.A. Ross, discussing ‘Social Darwinism’  in American Journal of Sociology 12 (March 1907), 715. Strongly attracted as I am by the hopeful and noble views that have been expressed, I cannot but feel that Dr. Wells’s is right.  The theory that races are virtually equal in capacity leads to such monumental follies as lining …

Continue reading

Scientific American: “The Science of Breeding Better Men” 1911

Editorial from a 1911 edition of Scientific American [Source]: Sci-Am’s Editor’s note: This editorial was written and published in 1911. Although our editors of a century ago pondered some lofty aspirations for the orderly future of humans, it was only three decades later that the brutal reality of a Nazi social order suffused with a …

Continue reading

Eugenics Quote of the Day: ‘Put the Defectives in a Camp and Drown Them’, W.S. Main, Wisconsin State Senator

W.S. Main, Wisconsin state senator, speaking in 1890, as found in “Criminals and their Treatment”, in Proceedings of the Wisconsin Conference for 1890. Quoted in “Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1960. If all these [hereditary criminals] could be marshalled into one great camp and with a mill stone around each of their necks, cast into …

Continue reading

Excerpt: Darwin’s Dilemma as told by Bertrand Russell, from Designing Babies

From Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology by Roger Gosden.  W.H. Freeman and Company, New York.  1999.  Page 3-4 According to Darwin’s theory, natural selection decides which individuals are fit to survive and breed.  So powerful was this idea that it quickly engaged not only fellow biologists but also intellectuals who were …

Continue reading

Julian Huxley: Birth Control, Family Planning or Population Control All the Same Thing; Taking Control of Human Evolution (1963)

Julian Huxley is a direct descendant of “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Thomas Huxley.  In this lecture from 1963, he makes it clear that birth control is family planning is population control.  He argues that the goal should be improving the ‘quality of human beings.’  The word for that, of course, is eugenics.  In other words, population control …

Continue reading

Davenport: Death is Nature’s Great Blessing to the Race. Why Keep Defectives Alive?

Charles Davenport, in The Eugenic Programme And Progress in its Achievement (1914) [italics in original, bold added] The lowest stratum of society has, on the other hand, neither intelligence nor self-control enough to justify the State to leave its matings in their own hands. On the contrary, the defectives and criminalistic are, so far as …

Continue reading

Separating Sex from Reproduction, the School, and the State

“The family is already being eroded by the intervention of school and state, and [the separation of sex from reproduction] might be its coup de grace.” G. Taylor, 1968

The Geneticists Manifesto (1939) or Social Biology and Population Improvement, by H.J. Muller

Social Biology and Population Improvement (aka, the Geneticist’s Manifesto) by H.J. Muller [Source #1, Source #2] The Seventh International Congress of Genetics adjourned at Edinburgh only three days before World War II got under way. It is interesting to recall that just before the shooting started a group of geneticists at that Congress-informally formulated what …

Continue reading

Bentley Glass: “No parent will have the right to burden society with a defective child”

Excerpt from Dangerous Diagnostics by Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence R. Tancredi (pg 12, 1994) [Source] And in the same year [1970], Bentley Glass, in his retirement address as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called for “the use of the new biology to assure the quality of all new babies.  … …

Continue reading